485C take us back to a time of refreshing innocence and artistic endeavour: in a career-driven music business where new bands’ live diaries are rigorously controlled to prevent over-exposure 485C are here there and everywhere sometimes playing out and about two or three times a week. So over the past few months they have performed for Disorder at The Old Blue Last for John Kennedy in Tooting for This Feeling at Nambucca for Club Fandango at The Victoria and for fun at The Horn in St Albans.

The end result is a proper live band a genuine let’s-do-the-show-right-here-gang armed with teenage cheekbones and a cheekily ragged demeanour. Doubtless you’ll all have your favourite 485C-er by teatime. Today ours is bassist Sam. Throw in ‘Strange Medicine’s clangingly canny resemblance to The Strokes being rewritten by Mungo Jerry and you surely have yourself a fun boy five for these tortuous times. Little wonder a smitten Steve Lamacq supported ‘She’ll Lie’ so heartily on 6 Music. 485C on the BBC ahoy!

Better still there is an intellectual undercurrent to 485C’s electric trickery: just check the way ‘Strange Medicine’ starts with “The sun will shine on us one day / When the senile minds of leaders rot and decay” or recall how back in the summer they frothed to a besotted Zine blog: “We just want to prove that people like us are still there…Everyone should create art because fuck knows we need it right now.”

Hence even the band name is designed to perplex and provoke: “We wanted a conceptual idea something people have to think about. If people asked about 485C we would just draw a huge question mark.” Pantone fans will of course instantly recognise 485C as the colour code for post boxes Routemaster buses and indeed the Central Line which carries them all the way back home to the far far east.

Better red than dead. Always.

Come see 485C paint the town a certain hue here and here:
JANUARY 4TH ST ALBANS The Horn
JANUARY 5TH CAMDEN The Monarch (single release party)